Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
The Jazz Musician as CIO: Creativity in IT Leadership
Jazz musician and CIO for the Georgia Tech Foundation, Dwight Dozier, joins the Top of Mind podcast family this month to discuss creativity in leadership. Describing his role as more relational than transactional, Dwight, whose focus is on donor and alumni engagement, emphasizes relationships, staying connected with students beyond graduation, and recognizing that the philanthropic efforts of alumni are the preliminary steps to a particular recruitment cycle. Making relevant parallels to his career in music and hitting on topics such as mass personalization and trends emerging in AI and machine learning to data interconnectedness and a frictionless experience, listen in as Dwight shares gems to put CIOs and institutions on a path toward innovation. “Like music,” he shares, “technology is constantly changing and evolving.”
Hello, and welcome to the December episode of Tambellini Group's Top of Mind Podcast. I'm your host Liz Farrell. In this episode, we're talking about creativity in IT Leadership with Dwight Dozier who serves as CIO for the Georgia Tech Foundation. Dwight has been serving in this role for a little around seven years. Prior to that he had led advancement and technology at numerous universities across the country. Welcome Dwight.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm especially excited for our discussion today because you have had such a distinctive set of experiences and roles that inform your perspective. There are two things, in particular that stand out that I think will be of particular interest to our listeners. First your role as CIO is slightly different than a lot of the other guests we have. They're usually CIOs of a university. Whereas you're in the advancement role. And as we had talked about before, this is the first time you've actually had the title CIO while working in advancement. And the other thing that I found particularly interesting was you for the duration of your three plus decades in higher ed, you have also been a professional jazz musician, which is just the coolest thing ever. I think you've been playing for over 20 years with the Jerry Tolson Quartet, their quintet and big band. With them, you've released five albums and toured the world performing at marquee international events, including the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. So we could spend the whole time talking about either of those two points, but we have so much to get to and you have so much to share. So, I thought we would start at the beginning and take it from there. You had mentioned to me that you got into playing musical instruments at a very young age. So what made you get into a technology career? In addition to that?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I indeed got started with music when I was eight years old— playing drums and it was a, it was a spark of passion actually at that eight years old. I had an epiphany of a marching band that was playing and I heard the drum core. So I had the band was playing and I was, I reacted to the band, but when the drum core came out, it just, it just struck me. And that passion existed to this day. So in regards to technology, it had something, you know, fairly similar to that as I—while attending college—I discovered working at a part-time job on campus in the Edward R. Morrow radio-TV service area at Washington State University. I was involved in doing some data entry in a donor donor area that I didn't know it was a donor area. And as I started to work in that area, I started getting, uh, exposed to computers. And, I had shared one incident in which, uh, even that day I was asked to watch a computer. And the gentleman said, when this completes, pull this floppy disk out, so they tell you how long ago it was. But he pulled this floppy disk out and it was, you know, a few minutes that he thought it would be running and it was almost an hour. And he comes back from his appointment, pulls the disc out and says, oh, that's done. And I just noticed that as a point of, wow, I'm sitting here kind of being apprehensive about this machine. Um, so that led me to another incident where then I ended up getting my first computer, which was a Commodore VIC-20— another point of my age group. And that computer I remember playing with and experimenting. And, I had one incident where I was typing a program. Back in those days, the programs were magazines. You had to type three or four days to get some program running and it too had a similar situation where it didn't, it just kept running wasn't wasn't performing correctly. And I, I learned from that situation that I had after reviewing my code and kind of walking through the process that I had a comma or semicolon out of place. And both of those incidents with the floppy disk, I mentioned to you, and this one made me think, wait a minute, this is the machine. And I'm the master of this machine. I can conquer this because it was me that put the semicolon now into place and me that, you know, kind of put a higher level on this floppy disk. And since then kind of the curtain raised and I've really, this is the other part. I found the passion of technology. So I'm very fortunate to share that as part of my life, as music, as a fashion and technology. And that led to the organization that I did the donor records. I ended up writing the donor records database, back then on a HP touch screen 150. Wrote the database. Processed the checks for the donation. Put together, at that time, mailing labels mailed out the programs and receipts and sent these checks over to an office called the Office of Development in the Advancement Office. And that's how I made my entree into this particular profession in this area.
Speaker 1:That's so cool. How you can trace it back to those light bulb moments. I mean, I definitely remember having a Commodor 64, which may make me a bit slightly younger, but I remember having to explain to like younger coworkers what a floppy disk was and how that worked and everything. Cause it's just sort of it's cool. When you think about knowing the hardware and how these things are built, um, how much progression there has been over all this time and you've certainly had a front row seat to that. So we fast forward 30 years later, and here you are CIO at the Georgia Tech Foundation. And can you just tell us a bit more about the foundation and your role there? You had mentioned to me some of the stuff around this that I hadn't previously considered in terms of, um, the data management and how the role's different from being at a university.
Speaker 2:Yes. At the foundation, we are independent from Georgia Tech, but we are very much cooperative in our support and our spirit. Part our part of our mission is to invest funds in support of Georgia Tech. So we've very, very strong partnership. And my role there is to support part of our charge and mission is to support the advancement function of the institute. So, I manage all the data related, IT-related functionality, related to the Georgia Tech Alumni Association, the Georgia Tech Office of Development, and Georgia Tech Athletics when it comes to fundraising and alumni engagement and outreach. And the foundation itself, as I said, manages the proceeds from those fundraising efforts that we have at the institute. And then we turn around and support the institute in various manners. So it can grow and continue to have the great reputation that Georgia Tech has.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's phenomenal. You had mentioned to me that something about your role is it's more relational than transactional. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Speaker 2:Yes. You know, the nature of our business in advancement, particularly when it comes to alumni and donors, as well, is it's longitudinal. So we're not transactional-based. It doesn't really pertain, you know, what have you done for me lately? We have a relationship. So if you're 22, as an example, and you engarage from a college or university, we want to have a relationship with you through your life. And it's really, you know, we use the term'cradle to the grave' in some cases. It's, you know, we celebrate the birth and growth of families, of alumni families as they come and their children may attend a particular institution. In this case, Georgia Tech. We bring them in. Hope they have a wonderful student experience as they graduate and being an alumni. We support them through that journey. Their first job. Often we, a lot of times, are involved in helping doing, providing mentorship and job opportunities through some of our alumni networks. And then as they become, you know, up the ladder and start working more, they can start to work in supporting Georgia Tech in some philanthropic ways. And even after that, even after they may pass away, we often still have a relationship with an estate that alum may leave for legacy. And again, start the cycle again of providing scholarships, bringing new students in and that whole, so you can see that relationship happening very, very, very important. I've been at one institution in which, at the time, we weren't getting a lot of philanthropic support fundraising support from this individual, but we did a family tree contest in the middle of the magazine. So of our alumni magazine, we opened the magazine and, you know, thought five pages of a spread. And we had determined 113 members of that person's extended family had attended in this case. It was Penn. Yeah. In this case, it was Penn State. Had attended the university. So 113, when you roll out the, the family tree, which was remarkable. Right. And the giving the giving at the time was, was, you know, there was some giving, but what, what was nice is subsequently I think towards the end and maybe when this individual, uh, or the great, great, uh, grandfather, something, somebody passed away in the family, we were left, left a legacy gift. So that relationship's important. Right. And, and in that case, Penn State really touched many, many people. And it still continued to, in that particular family,
Speaker 1:It's such a long, long-term engagement. I mean, when you think of admission cycle or even at the student cycle, um, when they leave, the engagement with them is handed off to you, but that's handed off and then it doesn't get handed off after that. It's just, as you said, cradle to grave.
Speaker 2:Right. And we, and that's, that's, you know, that's as an IT professional space, that becomes a challenge, but it's a great opportunity cuz we want know a little bit about their journey throughout their life, right? When you're 22 and 25, there's a different set of experience you're having then when you're 35, 45, 55. So you can imagine in a data processing world, we want to capture data that can help identify, you know, those, uh, certain involvements that are happening throughout their life. And that's, that's a challenge. We, we do that through data entry and you know, and now we do that through other tools of data acquisition and other methods.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I definitely want talk about those too, but I think you could give our listeners too, like the sheer volume of data, which one you told me this, I was shocked by, but as I think about it, of course it makes sense. I believe you said you're adding about 7,000 new alumni per year.
Speaker 2:We have, we add a significant number of undergraduates and graduates, um, to our, to our alumni roles. And right now Georgia Tech, as an example has one of the largest online masters of computer science. So even beyond the classroom, we're reaching out virtually where people can, you know, partake in some of our educational offerings. And so as we add these new alumni, you know, to our ranks and all that, it continues to grow. And as you said, one thing that you know is contrary to the transaction. And when we add, we don't, the only subtraction we had have is basically, you know, is deceasing, right. If a person is deceased or in some cases, if we lose contact with people, but we have ways of finding them. Yeah. But that's the subtractive ranks, you know, for the most part. Um, and so then, you know, the cycle continues where we add new graduates, um, um, you know, year after year. So,
Speaker 1:And there's also, as I think about it, maybe even after they're deceased, you know, if there is some sort of plaque or ceremony for them, like there is the keeping the engagement up with the relatives and showing the gratitude from the school for that and everything. So maybe it doesn't even end after death. It's just eternal.
Speaker 2:And in many cases that, that gratitude, uh, to say, thank you to them, you know, comes in the form, you may be walking into a, a building and an academic facility that's named after them. Right. So that legacy that legacy's continuing and I think it's very, you know, that's, that's one thing that's made me feel proud to be I've been in higher education, uh, really primarily in this space for, you know, over 38 years basically. And the, the fact that I'm involved in education, which is always a value add and it's propelling people forward and you can see, it makes a difference that makes me very proud to, to share this space.
Speaker 1:I must be very gratifying when you can see that, you know, especially having worked in so many different big institutions, I think you mentioned you worked at university of Louisville for a while as well. Correct. Um, and over the, these 38 years, um, your cross section of experiences must have given you a very broad yet in depth perspective on how technology and in, in the advancement world has evolved. Um, you had shared with me some of the biggest, significant changes that you think are shaping the current and future state of advancement in higher ed. So I thought it would be great if we could give the listeners a sense of some of your, your biggest trends and top hits here, starting with the notion of mass personalization.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's one that really strikes me as again, as I say is, we're trying to have these personal relationships over extended period of time. You know, how do we get to know people, uh, through data in many cases, in some cases, you know, from our side, we haven't seen them, they've graduated, they moved on, but data will tell us a lot. So as we wanna reach out to people, we don't want do it in a general generalistic way we want do in a very personal, so we do things en masse. We have lots of graduates as we just talked about. Uh, but we wanna be as very personal as, as possible. So, you know, that involves one of the things thathas come forward in these days and times is social media. For example, where people are, they're actually self, self sharing, a lot of their information, it could be Facebook, it could be LinkedIn, it could be other, other avenues that are out there. The other thing is that we're using tools t o help us to be more predictive and more analytic. U m, you know, some artificial intelligence is on the forefront within this space and machine learning. To try to, you know, determine, y ou k now, someone's a pplication. The example I have a nd I share sometimes is my own. I'm a graduate of Washington State University. I graduated within economics. I do IT as a living as we're talking about, and I'm a musician. And so if you look at the x-ray, as I w ould call it a t Washington Dtate, you know, you'll see the business school and my focus in economics. But I, I haven't answered that door in a long time, right? So to know me, you've gotta know my music side, you know, I've go to my IT side and, and other things may be that about me. So we have to do that. This is the mass part. We have to do that, you know, on all of our many, many, we have over 180,000 graduates at Georgia Tech and we have half a million, we have half a million and more constituents in our database, but we have to do what I just mentioned to you in an en masse personalization manner. So we can get to know those individuals.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It sounds like the AI and the machine learning is certainly helping that along because, you know, there there's no shortage of data. It sounds like, but there is a shortage of, uh, at least there has been traditionally of ways to synthesize that in a way that's meaningful for informing your work and the work of the foundation at large.
Speaker 2:Right. And, and, and, you know, we could have, uh, being a, a engineering school and a technical school, we could have graduates that did indeed graduate from the college to computing or college of engineering, but maybe at 55, they don't do that anymore. Maybe they're into environment concerns and those types of things. So, you know, if we, if we look at you know, their last footsteps that we know about, maybe that doesn't represent them. So that's why that's where a place when we talk about change is that we have to be, it's more than just, you know, I I'm back in the forties and fifties, you were just very proud of your institution just because, right. Yeah. And now, and the other part of that I see too, is with younger, our younger class of alumni, they're much more purposeful, you know, I'll support the institution. I'm happy to look at what I can do from a philanthropic standpoint, but I wanna see and feel impact of my gift, not just because, and so that's another change that, that we see in the, you know, more contemporary classes.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. And that again, is more data points that to act on. So we talked about the, the trends you've seen of the AI and machine learning this need for the mass personalization. You had also mentioned the cloud transformation and how that takes away or will worry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does. It that has been something, you know, part of it was cultural you're used to having, we had our own, within the foundation, again, as I mentioned, being independent, we had our own dark room and own machine rooms, servers, and all of that. And as we started to migrate a lot of our enterprise applications and other things to loud, uh, first there was a sense of, oh, I don't have control, right. I don't have my, my arms around this, but it's really kind of liberating because now you don't have to worry about those kind of things you have, you you've, you've, you've put in charge a very reputable, um, organization. We cloud has been a shift over my career anyway, uh, as a primary source of, of how things are interacting. And what's nice, a lot of the tools, and other applications out there are indeed already in the cloud. There's a number of other functions we use to thank donors, to steward donors, to provide mentoringship, mentor resource. And all of those are in the cloud. So now they're among the same family of things. So, um, you know, that has been, has been a big shift and been very, a very successful, successful one for us as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great to hear, because we hear so much about the challenges as everyone's trying to get to where you, you all are at, where not only do they have all the applications and platforms that have gone to a cloud model, whether that was native for them or an adoption, but, you have that undergirding infrastructure that's in the cloud as well, where there are the things that only your foundation is responsible for.
Speaker 2:Correct. And, I think the continued pursuit and sometimes challenge is whether it's cloud or not is the increase. This is something else that's much more, much, much emerging is the increased dependency. How do you interconnect all these data sources? Right? So if we have our enterprise database or enterprise system, and we're gonna connect to some of these other things that have their specific outreach purposes, it's now that, that request and that demand of connecting them. And of course, you know, our consumers are, which are our, our, our clients and the people that we support want to use the word can't adjust. Right. So yes, you know, so they, they go out and subscribe to an application for the, our purpose is a great application and they say, okay, we've we, we subscribe to this. Can't you just dock it here. Can't you just, and you gotta worry about data standards. You gotta worry about common keys. You gotta worry about all this kind of things in this kind of conversation. So that can cloud or not, that continues to be a challenge and a pursuit of, of doing that. Fortunately now, through the public of APIs and, and different, uh, you know, interface, uh, uh, protocols and applications, you know, where, where things are becoming easier to do that, but you know, that that's still, that's still within our realm of it, to it, to be able to address and challenge on a, on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:It's definitely at a higher altitude of function there that you all are tasked with—all those"can't you just", which brings me to the fourth thing that you had mentioned. And I, I think a lot of your colleagues, no matter what type of CIO role they are in or at any type of university, this Amazon expectation, can you tell about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that goes again with the just, you know, can't, you just kind of situation people come to us and, and I'm glad they have faith in us. That's the good part. They, they ask us, can we accomplish things, uh, in, in developing some functionality and some applications to help them do their job. And, and we, we, we do that. We make that as our, as part of our goal, but a lot of times they come up, come up with us with that, with that Amazon experience, right. They want that, and this is a word I love. So I, I do infuse this with my staff is frictionless. We do. We want our alumni, we want our staff, we want our, our constituents. We want all our parties to have a frictionless experience, but, you know, for example, you know, my organization is not as large as Amazon and as y ou, as you think about that, you know, Amazon has hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people working on all this experience, that if you click on a watch, and the next thing you show is a watch b and. Right. Right. And, and all of that type of stuff. And they develop that and it reads this and it pushes this out. And, and, um, so you know, that Amazon experience, as an example, is something we certainly pursue, but, you know, just kind of keeping in mind the scale and the resources and the dollars that behind that to achieve that Amazon experience. Um, I think that, you know, as an industry, I'm, I'm involved in our higher education, it industry as a whole, I've had some leadership roles in there on some committees and boards, and we are all, you know, striving to do that. We have a great partnership with each other and we share, we share our trades, right. We share our developments, but, um, that is a grow. That is, that is parti or goal that people are after is the, the whole frictionless experience. Um, and, and again, one of those is just the, is the continued use of the mobile phone. You're, you're sitting there with a communication device in your hand and a computer in your hand. So how can we, how can we deliver those kind of experiences to you in a value add method?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And also based on all my demographics and personal preferences and everything else, and how I would like to receive information, whether it's, you know, TikTok for the most recent grads or Facebook for us middle-aged people, or Instagram for everyone in between, and then maybe even some of the handwritten letters or those wonderful donor books that a lot of the people who have reached a point in their life where they may have the apital to donate much more generously, like to say as well.
Speaker 2:And that's an analogy I've used also in some presentations before. That was a great, great comparison is I use XM radio as an example. You know, when I again, when I was growing up, we had the 13 channels and a few radio stations on the radio. And now, you know, through, through XM and satellite radio kind of things, you have all kinds of choices of genres and channels that you can tune into. Right. And we have to do the same thing in this space and again, related to IT and the data. So we have to, if you're in the country, if you're in the hip hop, if you're in the pop, if you're in the opera, we have to, and we want to know those kind of things about that. So that means, you know, having that relationship, as we talked about again, storing data, uh, trying to deliver that data so we can program around that and making that frictionless. But that's something hat I've used before of doing turning tuning into, you know, your specific channel. So,
Speaker 1:Well, I'm glad you mentioned music there. I mean, I, and it's interesting. Another parallel I see, as you're saying that is, you know, every want, like people may listen to XM radio, people may wanna see live music. People may want to just have a Spotify channel with one playlist on it, but at the end of the day, they all want the same thing. They wanna get that happy, inspired, creative feeling from listening to music. They like, um, and I think it's the same thing for a, all the, your donors as well, right. They're, they're looking to make that impact, but how the, the channels you take to get there may be slightly different for each. Um, yeah. And you know, and another thing as we move to, I wanna talk a little bit more about your, your music career. You know, one thing that we see in both technology a nd music i s constantly changing, constantly evolving. It can be hard for anyone to feel like they really cover the waterfront and have discovered like either everything they wanna play or listen to, or all the venues they want go to. Um, so which brings me back to your career as a musician and how it relates to your talents and passion for the technology realm in higher education. Because although we do know a lot of CIOs who are very creative, I don't think maybe the prevailing external impression is that, oh, CIOs are also artists. They're also these creative performers and everything. So, um, you had also shared with me some interesting parallels between your careers in both areas. And I think our listeners would really enjoy hearing about those too. Um, you talked about how some of the skills have overlapped and how you've applied them in each and both. Um, and so I'd love to start with, uh, improvisation and music and some of your stories from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So improvisation is a good example that that does cross both areas. And when I think about that, again, particularly with technology, we have to be very adaptive. You know, we both from technologies changing, particularly now, things are changing quite rapidly from our customer needs from market need. We have to be able to be flexible and music's the same way. Uh, you know, we particularly, I'm a jazz musician, so that even makes it more so I've, I've been in many a venue and people say, you know, can you play, uh, you know, uh, sat Andal in a country and western theme, right. That kinda, uh, so you, and you, you may adapt. I mean, I've played all kinds of things. Um, uh, as a jazz group, uh, we were fortunate to open many years, many, many years ago for Martina McBride. So we had to put our, our jazz aside and, you know, kind of get the country theme on and you have to adapt. And, and I look at that the same thing, uh, in my techno technology world. And it's kind of liberating too, because, uh, again, you know, the different players, when I think about vendors, those are like, you know, different musicians I play with. Sometimes I, I play gigs where, maybe it's, I know myself and maybe the piano player, and there's other things when I get called to play there's other people, I don't know who they are, but so we have to come together right, and make a solid piece of enjoyable music together while having just met, you know, 10 minutes before. Um, so I, you know, I think there's some parallels to that. Um, as we got, as we get to support our end users and learned their needs, and of course the dynamics where, um, as I, as I mentioned, where we might, and I'm sure people can relate to this, you've created an application or support or program or some, some outcome and people go, yeah, that's what I asked for, but that's not really what I wanted. Right. So, you know, same thing kind of with music is now that you're here, we wanna change up your whole set list. So that, that kind of parallel is, is really good. And then this also, you know, I think as a musician, just being patient, right, and, and knowing, uh, you know, knowing what you're contributing to things. And the last part you talked about too, is that you said a minute ago about people are really kind of seeking the same thing. I do think with both it music at the end of the, at the end of the day, you're producing some something, and you're leaving something behind it produces satisfaction, right. It it's it's, we have it, we talked about relationships and getting in all these people, and let's say in this case, they come back and we are, we put our data together to have an optimal 50th class reunion, a, of people coming back to campus and they come back and they re reunite with some of their old classmates and recall some experiences on campus. And that emotes just a lot of positive feeling. And that's almost the same thing with music. It's like, wow. Right. And I remind my staff in the it area that we're the origin of that, that, that, that I to get to the programming, our, our colleagues that do the programming, do an excellent job, but, you know, we're the, we're the bed of providing that, being able to communicate with that, uh, with that constituency,
Speaker 1:That's a very, very good point. There's also a lot of resourcefulness involved in that. Um, you had mentioned to me one time, I think it was at the, the Montreux Jazz Festival as well, when you all were done playing and you were sitting on Lake Geneva.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. That was a, that was we. So we were fortunate to play the Montreux Jazz Festival And we also toured Peria—Peria,Italy. And we played there. So we were in Europe for three and a half weeks or something. And, we had an experience where we went to Montreux, we performed, we didn't think we actually did that well in some of our initial shows. And so towards the end of our tour, that was the end of our tour. We were kind of tired and we're like, okay, let's just maybe sit out the next portion of the venue and we're gonna be heading back home in four o r five days. So, u h, one of the organizers did think we did well as a matter of fact. And we, u h, were approached to do an opening venue for Patrick Metheny, the guitarist. Wow. So that was really neat. So we were able to have that experience. And then after we were done with that, that venue, um, there was experience where we had, there were two individuals that were both from North Carolina. One was playing standup, acoustic bass. One was playing acoustic guitar on Lake Geneva. And so they had of heard us and they said, wow, you guys sounded really good. You know, and we said, thanks. So my saxophone player, again, acoustic instrument grabbed his saxophone. And so the three of them are playing outside on at Lake Geneva. And it was just, you know, this is, I love jazz. It was beautiful playing. And I go, I can't resist. I've gotta do something. So I, this is the improvisation. Yes. I found two Chiquita banana boxes and I stacked them together. And I got a luggage cart with the drumstick on it. And I put one of my symbols on the drumstick to make kind of a symbol there. And I grabbed my brushes that make kind of a swish sound. And we played jazz on Lake Geneva acoustically, which is great. And I have a photo of that which is great. So that was a highlight of that trip.
Speaker 1:It's something just so satisfying about when you don't think you have the resources or the tools to do something and, and you find a way to make it work. And it just seems to me like that is so much of what you and others have to do as technology leaders. And when you do it well, it's bringing that creativity and sort of joy of the process to it. That's so important. So, um, with that in mind, I've really, really enjoyed our conversation today. And I can't thank you enough for joining us and share all these wonderful stories and experiences and perspectives that you have.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the opportunity. Elizabeth, it's been been a pleasure, kind of, going back and reciting some of my history and talking about the, you know, about the role of that I've played and the intersection with music. So thank you again for the opportunity.
Speaker 1:Well, lucky to have had you, and that concludes this month's episode of Tambellini's Top of Mind Podcast. If you want to hear some of Dwight's music, you can check out the Jerry Tolson Quartet's albums on any live streaming music services. That is Jerry Tolson—T-O-L-S-O-N. And don't forget to check out our other episodes, blogs, and resources at thetambellinigroup. com.
Speaker 3:<silence>.